Global Eye
Funeral Games
By Chris Floyd
The Moscow Times
June 11 - 17, 2004
http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2004/06/11/120.html
Some cynics say that Heaven's newest sunbeam, Ronald Reagan, was called "The Great Communicator" because he delivered his innumerable lies in words of one syllable. But this is just a typically vicious liberal canard.
For Reagan truly was a great communicator, though not with words -- or with facts, which he once called "stupid things." No, his genius lay in the manipulation of symbols to convey powerful messages that could no longer be voiced openly in polite society -- messages of hate, envy, fear and violence.
Reagan officially launched his successful 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia -- not the Quaker "city of brotherly love" in Pennsylvania, but a small town in the piney swamps of Mississippi, where three young civil rights workers had been brutally murdered by local officials in 1964 for the heinous crime of registering black people
to vote. This was the famous "Mississippi Burning" case, a stark symbol of the era of violent race-hatred and government-sanctioned oppression. The decades-long struggle to bring full constitutional liberty into this system was fiercely resisted under the rubric of "states' rights" -- a codeword for the preservation of white privilege and black subjugation. Every Southerner raised in that system (including your correspondent) understood this secret language.
To win in the South -- and counterbalance the heavy black vote for Democrats elsewhere -- Republican elitists adopted this ugly, divisive code. Their deliberate stirring of base emotions was also aimed at preventing working-class whites from making common cause with blacks and other minorities against the elite's systematic destruction of Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" social contract, which had placed a few mild restraints on the worst excesses of corporate greed.
Reagan, a long-time shill for corporate sugar-daddies, was a master at playing the race-card game on their behalf. Of course, he couldn't actually come out and say, "We're gonna put these darkies back in their place." But he didn't have to. Instead, he chose to stage the symbolic kick-off of his campaign in the symbolic city of Philadelphia, where -- to make his intent unmistakably clear --
he declared in the symbolic language of race hatred: "I believe in states' rights." This was a great communication indeed: Reagan carried every Southern state but one -- against a Southerner, the tepid New Dealer Jimmy Carter.
Once in power, Reagan slashed civil rights protections and supported the use of public money for private "religious" colleges that discriminated against blacks. He decimated housing, health, education and economic development programs for the poor. He helped flood the nation's ghettos with cheap cocaine through his criminal Iran-Contra scam, where the CIA countenanced -- and sometimes facilitated -- drug running by the Central American ganglords that Reagan employed to funnel illegal arms to his terrorist Contra army in Nicaragua -- as the CIA itself admitted in 1998, Consortiumnews.com reports.
Reagan then championed draconian drug laws and "mandatory sentencing" rules that transformed the American justice system into a vast gulag-state that
imprisons more people than any nation on earth. When Reagan took office, there were approximately 300,000 people in prison; when he left, the figure was 800,000. Now, under his ideological soulmate, George W. Bush, the number has topped 2 million, Reuters reports. Incredibly, one in every 75 American men is now incarcerated; 68 percent of these are racial minorities.
But we don't mean to imply that Reagan was personally a racist. No, his toxic legacy shadows every race, creed, color and nationality. His crimeful enterprises at home and abroad set the stage for today's lawless, murderous Bush-bin Laden world.
In Afghanistan, Reagan armed and trained hordes of Islamic extremists in terror tactics, and schooled their children in unrelenting hatred of infidels. In fact, the Taliban adopted the U.S.-written jihadi texbooks as their own; al Qaida's supporters in Pakistan are still using them today. Osama bin Laden was a prime beneficiary of Reagan's unholy Afghan alliance with
the intelligence services of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Communist China, MSNBC reports. Reagan also coddled Saddam Hussein, helped him coordinate chemical weapon attacks on Iran -- even approved the sale of anthrax and other poisons to Iraq, the Buffalo News reports.
Reagan willingly abetted the murder of countless thousands of innocent people throughout Central America, killed at the hands of U.S.-trained death squads and military units -- more than 200,000 civilians murdered in Guatemala alone, Consortiumnews.com reports. Many more were tortured and raped by U.S. proxies -- all this with the connivance of Reagan officials, who lied to Congress about the atrocities. One of these liars, Elliot Abrams, was convicted of perjury; but pardoned by George Bush I, he now directs Middle East policy for George Bush II.
In 1980, candidate Reagan and his running mate Bush I committed treason by bargaining with Iran's extremist mullahs to prevent the release of American hostages
before the election: a dirty deal confirmed by ex-Russian Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin's probe of Kremlin intelligence files (at the request of the U.S. Congress), and by several direct participants in the covert op -- but ultimately whitewashed by timorous Congressional investigators, Consortiumnews.com reports.
Finally, Reagan brought the ruthless Bush family into the center of world power. For generations, this ambitious clan has used war, weapons, oil and espionage to advance its senseless quest for more loot, more leverage, more privilege -- just more. Reagan armed them with the full might and authority of the U.S. government to work their greedy will on the entire planet.
Yes, as the laudatory headlines noted incessantly this week, Reagan indeed changed the world. It's a harsher, uglier, more unjust, more violent, more ignorant and fear-ridden place because of his leadership. God save us from any more communicators this
"great."
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